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The demand for launches isn't flat with respect to cost. The cost of launches just hasn't fallen much since the 1970s. This is because the political powers found the prospect of the boomer generation breaking out into space more threatening than the prospect of them becoming earth-bound basket cases -- even if it meant a neo-Guttenberg revolution via computer networking.

The threatening-but-far-less-so information technology revolution occured because Moore's law was already unleashed by 1970. By the time the bulk of the boomers were hitting the age where they were making career committments (1975) the network revolution was inevitable. The "market analysis" by a "government sponsored industry group" upon which the Space Access Society relies is reminiscent of when, in the early computer industry of the 1950's, IBM president Thomas J. Watson's market analysts provided a similarly flawed estimate of the demand for computers: six. That's right -- their cost demand calculations "flattened out" at six computers total -- no more computers would be built because the demand wouldn't justify it. Of course, it didn't take the transistor, let alone the integrated circuit and Moore, to show that estimate to be nonsense. Reality was that the cost demand curve wasn't as "flat" as the industry-dominating IBM would have liked and there simply wasn't as much perception that political power would be lost by expanding the access to computing as there was that, at the height of the Apollo program, power would be decentralized by expanding access to space for the boomer generation.

The historic analogue of the current situation is to be found in the fact that Leif Erikson not only mapped the first routes to the new world --he provided (under duress of the christian King of Norway) Iceland with its first Bishop of the Roman church -- which probably provided Rome with crucial information, if not maps, of potential new trade routes. But like all empires, they have to keep things "manageable". What followed was a similar "flat demand curve" for new world exploration as Mediterranean theocratic nepotism ("Is the Pope Italian?" used to be rhetorical question.) over potential trade-routes excluded northern european peoples until the Sephardic Jews, expelled by the theocratic Spanish Inquisition, teamed up with the Dutch and then, via Cromwell, with the British. This created the Protestant reformation which broke the Mediterranean monopoly on the trade routes (although it didn't allow the reestablishment of real mythic independence as would have the mass printing of the Eddas and Sagas) -- thus unleashing the age of exploration and establishment of the protestant colonies of north and west Europe.

Who are the Sephardim and potential "protestants" of the modern era? I tend to believe we should belooking for hysterical inquisitions against more genetically dominant cultures by the current theocracy of "political correctness" as it realizes African tribes, for example, are far from "politically correct". What will happen if more traditional African tribes team up with rural Americans, Russians, Australians, etc.? Certainly no one expected the combination of Guttenberg and Sephardic-edited Masoretic texts to unleash the old germanics from their domination to Rome's monopoly on trade routes.

This is the main reason why I recently spent a month travelling in Africa.

As I've said repeatedly in the past:

Promotion of politics exterminates apolitical genes in the population.
Promotion of frontiers gives apolitical genes a route to survival.

Change the tools and you change the rules.

OK, answering my own questions, but this contains all of the answers.

As a recent newbie to linux, the oreilly books actually helped me make Linux into a productive environment, and i still find them good reference.
I hope that the BSD book does the same.


free 31337 translation onthis link

{shhhhh... the froggies are asleep.}
spam-proofing?

Finally... motion blur!!!!

Is it just me, or don't those kids look a little young to be piss drunk...

Indeed. http://www.geocities.com/aragorn_39th/me.html... Birthday: 12/05/83 living in the UK.

Anyone know the drinking age there?

This raises an interesting point.
Im 16, and i've got plenty of pictures of me wasted. Can they be held against me?

IANAL, so advise away...
/nutt

The views that are expressed on the web are those of a priviliged class who do not have to suffer the effects of current liberal free-market policies and the increasing divide between the rich and the poor.

I think you're wrong in your underestimation of deviant political material on the web. I think that despite the fact that most people with web access (i.e. have fast computers w/56k modems at home) who are your middle aged white middle-upper class people are usually the ones who don't use the net as much as they could, because they are too busy working at corporations.

There's lots of younger people who like the net and certianally don't express the views of the stereotypical "privlidged class". Heck, rebellious teenagers alone probablly make up quite a large percentage of the people who USE the net (i.e. run around making web pages, chatting with imaginary internet friends, etc). Punks who hate their rich parents have been around for a long time, and I just think you underestimate their numbers online.

Don't belive me? Well here's Comrade John's Home Page for World Socialist Revolution as proof!

One interesting view of what a biotech-based future might look like can be found in Masamune Shirow's manga story "Appleseed". There are a lot of human/techno. themes woven into the complex plot but a central one is the idea that complex high-tech societies might need to be augmented with a bioengineered subpopulation (bioroids) in order to remain cohesive; and what that might mean for the nature of humanity.

The idea is that the genetic-based behavioural traits that made humans so successfull in the earlier phase of their evolution (agression, greed, tribalism etc.) might prove too disruptive for it to be possible to sustain complex societies with a very high degree of interdependance. In this model the very drives that led us to create the modern world eventually lead us to destroy it because we can't damp them down when they've no longer appropriate.

Overall it's a well drawn and well plotted story from a master of the genre. The anime (animated cartoon) version sucks rocks, however.

It also has some very cool mecha and other high tech toys and Masamune is also very good at drawing female charecters, which don't hurt the eyes. :)

That's right. The evil network executives force you at gunpoint to flip to the playboy channel. What a crock! Technology does not create the market for porn, it just eases the transaction!

society's sickest members to distribute information about the most taboo of topics: abortion, homosexuality, Islam, liberalism, etc.

I submit the sickest members are the hidebound conservatives who dismiss ideas through uninformed bigotry. What, you're not uninformed about these topics? Then you read the work of those you would silence. Why shouldn't someone else be allowed to, and form their own oppinion?

not honestly evaluating how well our choices fit into a moral and/or Scriptural worldview

Oh? Take a moment then to consider the Scriptural Worldview!!

If you were trying to make a living as a rock star, you had to expect hard times to begin with. Well, the market is changing, adapt.

Finally. What are the implications of fewer musicians? Well guess who we're weeding out? The ones who are in it for the money alone. again, Boo-hoo.

Sausage King of Chicago

Yeah, but if i did that, i'd have to buy a bunch of tux gear... or get a tattoo... or do SOMETHING to show off my inner linux geek... and tux gear and tattoos are expensive...

Think that was flamebait? You've obviously never met me in person...

Yeah... got one here (after digging thru my cache for like 10 minutes)... a REAL one, not goatse.cx...
front
back


Think that was flamebait? You've obviously never met me in person...

Yeah... got one here (after digging thru my cache for like 10 minutes)... a REAL one, not goatse.cx...
front
back


Think that was flamebait? You've obviously never met me in person...

I've been looking for this link all day : Mouse with Built in heatsink. This is weird !!!!

Note the red light shining through on two of the three shots. The AI article states that these may be blocked from shining through in the final unit. There appear to be two button/non-button type objects on the sides as well. This could possibly be used for the "squeasing" action. Also, the cord of this mouse matches the new braided cords Apple has been using for their keyboards. (The iHockeyPuck mouse does not currently use a braided cable.)

Apple may still surprise us all...

Absolutely. There's a guide posted at http://www.geocitie s.com/Hollywood/Land/8346/gungan_dialect.htm.

... MegaWeapon!!!!

Your Working Boy,

First Post is here.

it's life size.

(with a nod to Steven Wright)
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US Federal Jackboots

This boy is about to be sent back into slavery.
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One might confuse ASA with a "hill climbing" optimizer, but since it has a randomizing parameter (temperature) built in, it can be rationally adjusted to explore regions outside of local optima.

One might confuse ASA with a "hill climbing" optimizer, but since it has a randomizing parameter (temperature) built in, it can be rationally adjusted to explore regions outside of local optima.

I've lined up webspace with CGI capability, etc. and no advertising via a friend who has an under-utilized site at a hosting service. We've written up an agreement to cover the basics and assure the site stays up, even if there are some hassles along the way. I'll only have to relocate if I cause *operational* problems at his site. He likes the project, and corporate pressure (for example) wouldn't faze him.

He asked me not to announce the URL until I had a debugged site to put up (to give him a chance to give security a once-over first) and since this article is going to drop off the radar soon, I got a GeoCities page, where I will set up a FAQ, a feedback section, and announce the regular URL when it goes beta (Has any living website ever left beta?)

So after, say, Saturday (24 June 2000) , you may want to check in at the temporary page to see how things are coming. Bookmark it for future reference.

The single most immediately pressing question is "What do we call it?" It may not be the actual Award name (which will be the first order of business on the site, along with categories), but I can't keep calling it 'Coxsackie' forever (Coxsackie virus causes Hand-Foot-Mouth Disease. It's my personal term for projects I know I'll regret volunteering for. It also makes a moderately satisfying curse)

Ideas, people! I need ideas!

you can see a picture of the engineered mice here.

Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)

Wow, this article is some serious trollbait -- I'll bite!

Naked and petrified will live on, such as my creation for the /. trolls:
Natalie Portman naked and petrified.

Someone else created:
Signal 11 naked and petrified
and I wonder where they got the idea???

Young boys are always going to be able to get pictures of naked, not necessarily petrified women -- they're beautiful things, are they not? Didn't you ever stay up late to watch a "naughty" movie like Revenge of the Nerds or Porky's knowing that it would be an opportunity to catch a glimpse at some "hooters"? It's sad, but kinda funny, innit?

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Photoshop plug-ins like AlienSkin can't be used with gimp. However, the "Filter Factory" filters (.afs and .8bf) files can be used with the User Filter plug-in.

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Plug-ins: They make GIMP do stuff. http://gimp-plug-ins.sourceforge.net/
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The only real link I've got on hand is this one: Brian Greig's Orrery Page
(He makes orreries for museums, collectors etc, and some of them are pretty cool :-)

BTW, for those that haven't seen much of these things, an orrery (named after the Earl of Orrery, who commissioned one of the first built) is a device that shows the motion of the planets to scale (but not the size of the planets to scale...). And like the calculation engines, orreries today are done through software.
If you know a bit about the complexities of planetary motion (eg non-circular orbits, inclined orbits in which the plane of inclination drifts or rotates), seeing the various means of incorporating these aberrations into a clockwork model is quite fascinating.

One particularly nagging thing about the article was the assumption that the problem is finding the best gear ratio. Ha! The best ratio might be 103:17 but have you ever tried to find a gearcutter? The last one I saw was in a museum (I must have been a pathetic sight - pressed up against the glass like a kid outside the candy store...), which means I have to buy manufactured gears. Which means finding the best gear ratio out of the gears available to me. Sure, it cuts down on the computation, but you need to make a longer gear train to get even remotely close :-(

Ah well.
It seems a shame that the skills and tools of so many of these crafts are dying or dead (if only because they could make amazing things that modern manufacturing methods are currently simple incapable of producing).

I hope this doesn't come off sounding pedantic, but no, I don't own a Pilot. I own a Palm. And before that I owned a PalmPilot Professional. In fact, Pilots haven't been produced for about two years now, not since Palm lost their lawsuit to Pilot Pen Company. For anyone interested, here's a little Palm History.
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SSL, Shockwave, and Java?... If it replaces Communicator, how do you deal with these not being in Mozilla?

GPL Flash[tm] Plugin 0.4.9 is released !!!

Worry the not. All in progress. GPL shockwave... much better than a closed proprietary, single-platform plugin, don't you think?
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As soon as they start bulking Technics bricks, axels, and the jointed plates I can finally start building my Robotech Valkyrie and Optimus Prime!

Next time include the reference.

DB

I assume you are referring to this urban legend on the Darwin Arwards web site. It's a good story, and there may be some truth to it.

Next time include the reference.

Former research IBM scientist Ron Feigenblatt has some interesting comments about Microsoft ClearType. Feigenblatt explains subpixel addressing, dynamic pixels, and color convergence problems on LCDs.

.... when people start playing The Incredible Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane while they're driving! Get off the roads now!

Man, somone should have thought of this before .

The old Infocom games ran on a virtual machine called the ZMachine. A lot of work (ie. reverse engineering) has been done on this over the last 10 years or so and a plethora of original works are released every year that use this system.

The best interpreter IMO for the ZMachine, is Frotz. It is available for many platforms and source code is available so porting to a mobile phone is always a possibility.

Moreover, a complete programming language explicitely designed for producing ZMachine games is also available. Inform This too is available for many systems along with source code.

Finally, an excellent repository for text adventures can be found at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive

Have fun :-)

AOL/Time-Warner/CNN/Netscape

For example, I watched broadcast TV news in Harare, Zimbabwe, a few weeks ago as CNN told me and other Africans a story about an IE security hole. CNN then recommended downloading Netscape to avoid said holes. CNN didn't mention that CNN is now part of the same conglomerate as Netscape, nor did it mention that Netscape's browsers have had their fair share of really nasty security holes. People around the world are even less aware of the corporate conflicts of interest of CNN than are folks in the US -- but they certainly know Bill Gates is The Great Satan of computing thanks to CNN's globally broadcast coverage of The Microsoft Anti-trust Trial.

Reading the state-run newspaper in Harare had put me in a frame of mind where I found this behavior by CNN to be so transparent as to be down-right comical. However, I understand not everyone shares my ancient history of interest in mass media's influence on culture and are therefore not quite as jaded about conflicts of interest in media as I might be. Among those people are a few who will perceive what has happened during the last couple of years of new/old media mergers and decide that Bill Gates might not be The Great Satan after all. That means a number of quite perceptive individuals may decide Bill Gates is The Not-So-Great Satan and that working with him is The Lesser of Evils. Furthermore, it could be very good business right. The Not-So-Great Satan is being forced to pay attention to exceptionally perceptive technologists for the first time in a long time. The Not-So-Great Satan might really get off on the idea of showing AOL/Time-Warner/CNN/Netscape a thing or two in the area of innovation. Finally, The Not-So-Great Satan has boatloads of capital sitting around.

What will The Not-So-Great Satan end up doing with those exceptionally perceptive mercenaries?

This page has a pretty detailed overview about whats available and what platforms each toolkit works on.

Call me a schmuk but I like Clancy, Crichton and Grisham.

For some reason, I was once asked not to use that word. I don't even know what it means, frankly.

And yes they are literary giants... of our times.

No, they are not. You're thinking of Toni Morrison (Beloved) and David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, highly recommended, if you don't have anything else to do with the rest of the month). The three writers I taunted earlier are the Robert W. Chambers of their time: populist hacks who'll be lucky if one of their more obscure books is credited by a truly worthy later author as an influence. (The King In Yellow is sort of neat, in an "expanded from Poe" kind of way.)

If you really think BE is a good book, you can read Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land for some insight into Hubbard's career. ;)

-jpowers

I've been thinking along similar lines, and having a go at expressing it visually - like the ads in question do. Take a look at my first attempt here - I'd love some feedback as I'm unsure about the caption - I've had so many other ideas for the text (and I'd like to hear other people's suggestions too.)

(You can safely skip the rest of this message if you ignored the link)

The image also works for several different themes, depending on caption, which makes things harder.
Is the current caption better than say, something along the lines of:
"Is there anything else left to sell?"
"Are yours a different colour?"
"No Limits. Because I'm Worth It."
"J&J Marketing Innovations - We can put your message everywhere."
"The eyes never lie."
"It's only skin deep, right?"

Is there a more succinct phrasing of one of the above that would work better?

Interesting and bizarre. The Playstation has an RS232 serial port, and I understand that's what mobile phones use too. So why connect it to the controller port? I can only assume it's so that Sony can sell another proprietary interface cable (you should see how much they charge for digital audio cables for their DAT recorders).

Telling someone "here, this is what we do, oh, and BTW, you can't do that without paying us licensing fees" doesn't seem much use to me. I don't think the jugement affects this. Nothing that I could see (IANAL) seemed to stop them from owning and using patents - in fact, the final judgement states that IP rights used by both companies (presumably including patents) "shall be assigned to the Applications Business, and the Operating Systems Business shall be granted a perpetual, royalty-free license to license and distribute such Intellectual Property in its products".

What good has visual programming environments provided for windows?

Lots.

Just this morning I wrote an app for my boss that lets him generate custom reports from the backend database of a proprietary program we use.

Using C++ Builder, it took me 15 minutes. I could probably have done it in Access in an hour or so. Had I used a non-visual method, and just made API calls to create the GUI, I'd say this one would have tied up the better part of the day.

Visual programming environments make the GUI design simple and let you concentrate on the actual problem you are trying to solve, instead of keeping track of the x,y coordinates of the corners of some button you're putting in a dialog box.

how many useful apps have been made with something like delphi or visual c or whatever?

Heh. Probably the vast majority of useful Windows programs were done in such an environment. Oh, you want a specific example, you say? Try VirtualDub. It's a very high quality, very useful video capture and editing program that is GPL'd and written in, you guessed it, Visual C++.

There's a more recent, less in-depth review comparision of FreeBSD vs. Linux vs. Windows NT here. Why Yahoo! Uses FreeBSD is also interesting.

www.ironchef.com

and some sites not (yet) down:

http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCi ty/1365/
http://home.pacbell.net/ogytork /html/iron_chef.html


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Many years ago, I had this guy from my school leave a bunch of very bizarre and often threatening messages on other people's answering machines and voicemail - and leave my phone number on it.

I finally found one sympathetic company willing to play the message back to me over the phone - I recall it had something to do with "and I'd better be seeing that money soon, understand?" Of course, I recognized the voice, and I called my local police department to see what the law had to say on the matter... and guess what? It counted as telephone harassment, same as if he'd have called me directly.

So, if'n I was IBM's bigshot lawyers, I'd go after them for either theft of services or harassment. It seems to me that ibm.net must have gotten flooded with "die fsckin' spammer" and "delete this account" messages... sounds like the same concept to me!

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Make Money on the 'Net

I'm the guy that e-mailed CmdrTaco the penguin/calvin spoof. In fact, I drew it right after I read that article on The Onion. Evidently Rob thought my e-mail was my attempt at a serious political statement and not just the doodle it really is. It's okay...he didn't hurt my feelings that bad. I still love Geeks in Space. More jokes about Hemos's pants!

Peace. Sway

Umm... check me if I'm wrong here, but PalmOS seems like a good candidate for most of the things you've described! Yeah, one could possibly make the argument that "it's not a *real* OS" but it's nonetheless clear that they put a lot of thought (read: research) into it!

You turn on the computer and it works instantly.
Yup.

Whenever you feel like stopping you turn off the computer.
Yup, this one too.

You never have to save your files, you always work with up-to-date information
Hmm, not sure (I don't actually own a Palm yet) but I think this is true.

You never have to drag or resize a window
Okay, PalmOS kinda breaks here with the whole multiple-window concept.

My mom can store her weaving project ideas on it without any help
I don't think anyone will argue that there is a lot of room for ease-of-use research!

You never have to remember obscure names, everything is built out of a small set of simple blocks
Have you seen "The Brain"? It's certainly not an ideal solution - but it's definitely some damn impressive research in this direction.

You never think about "connecting to the internet", you just work with data that happens to be located somewhere else
Now don't get me wrong - I am certainly no supporter of M$ - but I give credit where it's due. I won't claim they did a good job of it, but isn't that what Billy Boy was claiming they were trying to do when they pushed for IE integration?

I think that there is some damn good research being done - even some of it by people we "may not like" such as MicroSloth. As an example, their new optical mouse is damn impressive - not dreadfully useful *yet*, but wait until someone figures out that this technology could be used to build a industrial-ruggedized version!

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Make Money on the 'Net

Indeed. Even on the net, most people still tend to rely on a few sources of information. Those sources of information will remain controlled by a few individuals or corporations. It used to be the newspapers, then the tv stations and now it's the web sites. We get complacent and turn to Slashdot for news but what happens when net censorship becomes something no longer interesting enough to cover and gets rejected as a story? We need to get our news from multiple sites and view our politics from multiple perspectives as well.

Of more interest but rejected by slashdot is the story of how Microsoft has frightened virtualdub into removing its reverse engineered support for the asf file format. MS got a patent on its asf file format you see. Now if they do the same for the next release of their MsOffice package or SMB you can kiss interoperability goodbye.